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Twitter indicated election 2012 outcome

HootSuite, an online dashboard that allows you to connect to multiple social networks from one website, delved into the tricky game of election analytics this election cycle and found out a few interesting things from their results.

By analyzing tweets and tweets only, the people at HootSuite were able to predict the nature of public sentiment toward both presidential candidates.

What they found was that tweets about Obama were around 20 percent negative, while tweets about Romney were 36 percent negative.

HootSuite started aggregating these statistics during the last few weeks of the race.

Additionally, many more people in general were tweeting about Obama than Romney, according to twitter stats. On Nov. 5, about 59,000 people tweeted @mittromney while more than 85,000 tweeted Barack Obama. When it became clear that Obama was going to sweep the election, the incumbent president’s twitter mentions became increasingly more common than those about Romney.

On the flip side, Paul Ryan’s twitter account was much more popular than Biden’s during the election, but first lady Michelle Obama trumped Ann Romney’s popularity stats exponentially.

Obviously, these statistics are not demographically representative of the U.S. population. Twitter users tend to be younger, I would assume, and younger generations were more supportive of Obama’s camp than Romney’s. Even still, HootSuite’s analysis offers an interesting glimpse into the public opinion that is thrown so freely into cyberspace and, in essence, is at the complete disposal of media scrutinization.